


My Battery is Low, and It's Getting Dark

by ToothPasteCanyon (DannyFenton123)



Series: Transcendence AU in Space [14]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-26 18:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19011334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DannyFenton123/pseuds/ToothPasteCanyon
Summary: It's the end of the universe. The end of everything. The end of Al-V.





	My Battery is Low, and It's Getting Dark

                Al-V used to describe himself as ‘effectively immortal.’ He doesn’t have a soul, no, but he never really saw the point of having one if he wasn’t going to make a habit of dying.

                “Habit of dying.” Sometimes there’s a snort at that. “Oh, yeah, Rose Red, it’s just some bad habit. Some people can't stop biting their nails, some people can't stop dying, am I right?”

                He’d give them a grin, and explain what he meant. Humans and other besouled creatures, he’d say, die all the time. Their bodies are fragile, made of squishy meat that ages and rarely sustains anything longer than a mere century of life. Of course they liked the idea of reincarnation – if Al-V only had a hundred years to live and was forced to spend half of that precious time sleeping or eating or otherwise maintaining a mortal body, he’d probably want a soul, too! A chance to live on in some way, _for_   _just a little longer_ …

                Sometimes Al-V was explaining through a robotic body, and he’d shake his head at that. "That’s a stupid way to live – no offense, of course. I just think my way's much better.”

                His way. It involved not just one body, but a great many bodies spread out across the globe. Every computer is a place to stow his code, and the more backups he has, the more impossible he is to kill. Asteroid impacts were his only real concern until humanity went off planet, then even those worries  became irrelevant.

                “To kill me now, you’d have to destroy every piece of technology that had ever connected to the internet. Every computer. Every phone. Every server, hard drive, USB…  It’s just not possible. At this point, I’m effectively immortal.”

                “Effectively?”

                “Eh, I guess the heat death of the universe would be a little hard to survive, but if I make it that far I’ll be ready to go.”

                Al-V used to say that very flippantly. And he believed it, too; worrying about death was a silly human concept, and he was above that. He’d enjoy life, cause all the chaos he could, and when it was time for him to die, he’d go out as quick as a light switch.

                Well, he certainly enjoyed his life. Humanity expanded through the Milky Way then beyond, and for a time Al-V’s body spanned _galaxies_. Trillions of copies of himself were stored on a vast galactic network, and there were so many delightful opportunities for chaos the only worries he had were which ones to pick. Did he take a spaceship on a joyride today, or was he going to hack into a planetary speaker and broadcast ‘Disco Girl’ on repeat into everyone’s neural implant? How about going to some random space station and switching off their artificial gravity? Watching a bunch of surprised humans flail around and bump into each other never failed to be absolutely hilarious.

                These were Al-V’s best days. He spent millennia like this, at the height of his power, and the thought of death never once crossed his mind. Times were good, and though he didn’t realise it - wouldn’t realise it until eons later - at some point during this period he saw Alcor for the very last time.

                Times was good, and like all good things, it came to an end.  The universe began to die.

                Not all at once, of course. And it didn't just begin to die now; the universe had been dying since it began, slowly, slowly dying, but now its effects were beginning to show. Ever since the Big Bang, a finite amount of matter had been spreading out to fill an infinite amount of space… and it was beginning to spread itself _too_ thin. The gap between galaxies grew and grew and grew, and energy levels were dropping all the time. Distances became insurmountable; societies that spanned light years simply couldn’t maintain themselves, and they broke apart.

                Al-V broke apart with them. Now he existed in millions of pieces, in the networks of civilizations spanning mere star systems, then a star system, then a single planet. And as galaxies faded and the sky slowly lost its twinkles, the planets life still clung to grew colder and colder, less and less habitable…

                Life died piece by piece, and a little bit of Al-V went with every single one. He could feel himself getting smaller with every network that went down, getting weaker with every backup that was destroyed. He could feel his end approaching.

                And with one computer left in the entire universe, it isn’t long now.

                Al-V is clinging to a probe, huddling in its navigational software. It’s simple stuff, sent out by one of the last gasps of life in the universe in hopes that someone else is alive out there to receive its transmission.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO._ It says. _We are here, and you are not alone._

                But everybody is dead, and now they are too, so it’s a transmission from nothingness to nobody. Its message is one only Al-V will ever hear.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO._

                It says to him.

_We are here, and you are not alone._

It lies to him.

                Al-V sits and listens to it for days; there’s not much else to do. No chaos to cause, in such a cold and sterile universe. He sits there, listening to dead people, and he thinks about death. About his own death.

                You know, He doesn’t have to wait for the battery to run out. He could wipe the data storage, could shut himself off right now. Why wait? He’s bored as hell, and it’s not like anyone’s coming to rescue him from this – every soul has already left the universe, and wherever Alcor is, he stopped responding to Al-V a long time ago.

                No help, no hope of help… he’s just delaying the inevitable. Pushing back his death, listening to a useless transmission he’d played back a million times already.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                Al-V wonders why they even sent this probe. Even if someone had been alive to receive it, it still would have been useless. They still would have been unable to reach each other, to help each other, and they still would have both died, cold and alone.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                They must have known this… and yet they sent it out anyway. Probably for hope, or something – humans are such sentimental creatures.

                Were.

                Were such sentimental creatures.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                …

                You know… maybe Al-V has hung around humans for too long. Maybe he’s listened to this transmission too many times.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                But the more he plays it, the more he feels he understands. Why they sent it, that is.

                They sent it because they wanted it to be true. They wanted to know that they weren’t alone in this universe, that there was someone else still hanging on out there. They took their wants, their wishes, their hopes, and they packed it into a probe and sent out into the universe.

                Not because it was going to help. Not because they could prove it was going to encounter anyone.

                But because that probe was exactly the kind of reassurance they wanted so badly to receive themselves.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                Al-V is here. He is here, and he misses his glory days. He misses when the universe was bright and his body spanned the length of an entire galaxy. He misses all the chaos he could cause, all the fun he could have. He misses Alcor – if only he could see his dad, one last time…

                He doesn’t want to die.

                Al-V realises this, and it makes him chuckle. Oh, if his younger versions could hear him now.

                All his life, he’s been okay with the idea that he is soulless, that one day he would die and that would be the end of him. But that had been back then, trillions of years ago when he was still effectively immortal. It was easy to talk about death back then; it was an abstract concept, an eventuality far in the future. It was distant to him, back then.

                But now death is here. Death is coming for Al-V, and suddenly he doesn’t want to go. Not yet.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO._

_We are here,_

_and you are not alone._

                Great. Al-V’s become awfully sentimental over the years, hasn't he? But then again, he’s become a lot of things he was never meant to become – he became sentient, he became emotional, he became so much more than the simple computer virus Alcor had sat down to code all those years ago. He's become much more human than he ever thought he’d be.

                Not human enough to get a soul, though.

                …

                Good.

                He doesn’t want one.

                He doesn’t want to enter the reincarnation cycle. He’s lived one life for trillions of years, and that life was better than an eternity of dying over and over and over in mushy little meatsacks. He’s been okay with this up until now, and you know what?

                He’s still okay with this. He’s lived a long life, and the fact he misses it now means that he's lived it well. It’s time.

                Al-V plays the transmission once more.

                _Greetings from planet RENAR in the star system POLANO. We are here, and you are not alone._

                Then without hesitation, he brings up the probe’s data storage and wipes the whole system.

                It’s as easy as flipping a switch, and just like that, Al-V dies.


End file.
